I recently watched Shakma (1990) - that japanese poster is so much better than what we got - and am simply astonished by how boring a movie about a drugged-up baboon could be when you take the focus off of the baboon and mad science and instead focus it on LARPing. I was curious about what the film's trailer had to say about this afterwards and instead found this.

People wander around the building, the monkey slams its face against a door.People run and hide, the monkey slams its face against a door.People run up and down stairs, the monkey slams its face against a door.

The most visually ridiculous scene for me occurs when "Shakma" has one of the players trapped in a closet full of chemicals. The player's mask is flipped up and bent in such a way that it has the doofiest looking expression on its face. On a shelf next to him is an empty beaker and a bottle of sulfuric acid. The guy keeps looking back and forth between it and the door in what's intended to be a tense moment but the angle from which the scene is shot makes it look like that doofy mask is looking at the acid, and it does this for nearly a full minute. The impression failed as I laughed hysterically.

I watched that a few weeks ago and was pretty bored by it. The characters just weren't the sort of people I could care about and that stupid monkey took forever to kill them. My biggest "Oh for chrssiakes" moment was when they said the only phones in the building were in the professor's offices, and our "hero" couldn't dream of breaking down any of those doors - yet here we've got what looks like a 40 lb. monkey who can darned near break down every other door in the building. And the hero...what was he trying to do anyway? Always finding someone, then running off to find someone else - who was already dead - and meanwhile the previous person he found got killed because he just left them. And his "shocked" expression was halfway between "I need to vomit" and "I'm gonna cry". It was seriously laughable.

Logged

I know that I am stupid but when I look around me I feel a lot better.